While doing some Hofner research around the Web, I ran across www.voxshowroom.com/northcoast/index.html, the website for North Coast Music in that hotbed of the British Invasion, Cudahy, Wisconsin (!?!?!??).

I have a perpetual soft spot for this stuff, but now I can buy a Super Beatle bass rig, chrome stand and all? Custom built in America's Dairy Heartland, under the auspices of Vox in the UK. Don't you just love the Global Economy in this wired world?

Probably won't get one. But I got a bang out of this stuff and thought you guys might, as well. Something about that picture of all those Hofners really gives me a Big Macca attack!

The gentleman who also owns Sonic Sound (the PA folks) also holds US rights to all VOX gear and, interestingly, I'm told, Hofner as well. I honestly did not know he was manufacturing VOX gear (though his plan certainly seems as if it could handle the task) and I know his relationship with Hofner is strictly marketing, but this is all sort of a local legend around Milwaukee, where Sonic/North Coast/VOX-US is located. The same gentleman, by the way, performs in a primo Beatles tribute band throughout the upper midwest.

As I understand it, the biggest VOX biz athey do is in unloaded speaker and head cabs. That way you can load your SVT into a VOX and have best (wierdest?) of all worlds.

It really is amazing and kind of cool to be able to see a Super Beatle trolley cab, with all that chrome and geometric print grill cloth new and in living color. For years, the only place you could see that such things ever really existed was looking at very used up pieces on the 'bay or in vintage shows/catalogues.

I haven't felt the urge to order a Super Beatle myself, but they are fun to look at. Bill

Oh the memories. They have Grenadier columns complete with the stands. These were the first PA speakers I owned back in my early teens. I had a pair of these, two Atlas horns on stands and the Churhill head.

Well wouldn't that just be nuts! From ten feet away, it look's like Paulie's rig from Ed Sullivan: You get up close and it's stuffed with an F2B, SuperFilter, and a QSC hidden in the floor of the cab! FAB! !

It had a snapped neckjoint that needed to be re-set. It sounded really cool, very deep and powerful. I played some Cream basslines after I re-assembled it, wondering why Jack Bruce never played a Hofner.